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Chasing Madoff: Tracking Wall Street’s killer white whale

Completing the “Wall Street Noir” triptych that also includes Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and Alex Gibney’s Client 9 — with which it even shares the spectre of a pre-deposed New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer — is Jeff Prosserman’s Chasing Madoff, a propulsively unsettling documentary about fiscal apocalypse that plays like The Insider by way of Three Days of the Condor.

It’s the creation of 28-year-old writer-producer-director Prosserman, an expat-Torontonian and former Ryerson student who moved to New York just in time to watch the world of high finance crumble around him. “You’d see these guys who were hedge fund executives one day screaming in their phones at Starbucks the next”, he recalls.

Chasing Madoff focuses on the decade-long campaign by the doggedly conscientious lone-wolf number cruncher Harry Markopolos — a former portfolio manager for a Boston-based equity asset firm who saw through Madoff’s scam “inside of five minutes” — to blow a whistle on the perpetrator of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

Problem was, it was a whistle no one wanted to hear no matter how hard Harry wanted to blow it.

Indeed, among the movie’s many jaw-dropping, stranger-than-fiction moments are several in which Harry plunges over the psychic cliff into a perfectly reasonable form of paranoia. A former serviceman, he starts packing a gun wherever he goes, checking the underside of his car daily for bombs, wearing a bulletproof vest and instructing his wife on how to best shoot home invaders should they charge the bedroom after killing Harry himself.

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Prosserman knew he had a terrific first-person true-life thriller in Harry’s story — Markopolos subsequently became something of a contemporary folk hero when he testified before a 2009 congressional hearing into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s total disregard of all the warnings about Madoff it had received. But he also knew that the endangered lone-wolf narrative couldn’t be permitted to eclipse what he called his film’s “philosophy,” which is “the human cost, the human tragedy, of so much being taken from so many who were so vulnerable.”

If the movie has a message, Prosserman says, that’s it.

“I’m not a financial guy,” he says, “but when I saw the evidence Harry had compiled against Madoff, and then I saw just how much trouble he had in getting people to pay attention and listen to him, I knew we had a very, very powerful story.”

But this is also why Chasing Madoff regularly intersperses its sinuously unfolding account of Markopolos’s increasingly desperate attempts to get the truth out with wrenching testimonies of Madoff’s almost countless (and usually anonymous) victims — those people who trusted their life savings to a piece of paper that suddenly burst to cinders in their hand.

While the movie never presumes to understand or explain Madoff himself — instead, he hovers like an inscrutable shadow on TV screens and recorded phone conversations — Prosserman insists this was entirely in keeping with the movie he wanted to make. Not one about the criminal, but about the staggering impact of his crime.

“I know this may sound kind of presumptuous,” says Prosserman, “but I kind of think of it as kind of like Moby Dick. Bernie Madoff is the whale, but the real subject, the hero, is the guy who’s chasing him.”

Chasing Madoff has its North American premiere at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 10 at the Bloor Cinema.

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